Studio Art Process

 I teach an art option class in addition to my Humanities teaching load. I love teaching art. It's such a relaxing pause in the day, when I just get to help kids create.This year, Covid has thrown a bit of wrench into option scheduling. Typically, students rank their option choices and get placed in courses they're interested in. Because we need to keep kids in their homeroom cohorts, we've moved...

From Safe to Brave

 A couple of years ago, we started our year in grade 8 Humanities by having the students create a user manual. It was good, but it missed the mark in a couple of ways, namely, the students didn't use them beyond the assignment. In an effort to more purposefully set students up for the work they would do throughout the year in Room to Breathe, we hacked it, and came up with From Safe to Brave.The...

Developing Classroom Norms

 We know that establishing a culture of trust in a classroom is a prerequisite for creativity to flourish. Among one of the things my grade 8 team has done to establish a culture of trust at the beginning of the school year is to develop a set of grade 8 norms. We were inspired by a video we saw from Edutopia about a teacher in Maine who did something very similar with his students. We have developed...